Database Management

Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) continue to do the heavy lifting in data management, while newer database management systems are taking on prominent roles as well. NoSQL database systems such as Key-Value, Column Family, Graph, and Document databases, are gaining acceptance due to their ability to handle unstructured and semi-structured data. MultiValue, sometimes called the fifth NoSQL database, is also a well-established database management technology which continues to evolve to address new enterprise requirements.

Database Management Articles

Henry Olson, director of product management, Embarcadero Technologies, tackled the cultural, technical and methodology gaps between the worlds of data architecture and agile development the challenge of retaining the benefit of data architecture and data modeling in the agile world in a lively presentation at DBTA's Data Summit in NYC that drew numerous follow-on questions from attendees.

Providing customers with turnkey sales and support - including installation, upgrades, training and system maintenance - GSI, Inc., a Platinum level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), is now distributing Oracle's JD Edwards software.

Great tech conferences provide information on new approaches and thought-provoking - sometimes even uncomfortable - discussions. With three tracks of sessions, preconference workshops and a product showcase, DBTA's 3-day Data Summit conference in NYC allowed attendees to hear what experts really think is important in big data.

In his hard-hitting presentation on big data at Data Summit, Rick Smolan, a Time, Life, and National Geographic photographer, and author of the book, "The Human Face of Big Data," described big data as "the development of a nervous system for the planet," and shared insights about the current impact as well as the potential for the future - of everything that can be measured being measured.

It's an inevitable fact that every software system will have problems, but an enterprise-grade Hadoop infrastructure puts minimizing and managing these system errors at the forefront. When considering a distribution's dependability, you should evaluate a Hadoop distribution's position in five foundational necessities.

Recursive SQL can be very elegant and efficient. However, because of the difficulty developers can have understanding recursion, it is sometimes thought of as "too inefficient to use frequently." But, if you have a business need to walk or explode hierarchies in your database, recursive SQL will likely be your most efficient option.

At an event in NYC, Oracle president Mark Hurd and EVP John Fowler unveiled Solaris 11.2, which represents an evolution from operating system to a complete platform, they said. The phenomena of cloud and engineered systems are driven by the same requirement, which is the need to transfer work from the IT budget to the R&D budget to make things work more efficiently, observed Hurd, who asked, "Who really wants to glue an operating system to a server?"

With more than 300 nominees across multiple product categories, the DBTA Readers' Choice Awards are unique in that the winning products and services are chosen by you—the people who actually use them. You can vote for as many or as few of the nominees as you choose. Vote today! Voting closes May 23.

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 finally went RTM (Released to Manufacturing) at the beginning of this month. Here's a look at the key new features within three major areas of enhancement: Mission-Critical Performance, Business Intelligence, and Hybrid Cloud.

BackOffice Associates' HiT Software division has announced that DBMoto version 8.2 includes support for SAP Sybase IQ, and support for Oracle Database 12c as a multitenant database with one or many pluggable databases;

Did you vote yet today? The 2014 Database Trends and Applications Readers' Choice Awards are uniquely meaningful because the winning products and services are picked by you - the people who actually use them.

In recent years, PostgreSQL has become the default back-end choice of developers for many web and enterprise applications. PostgreSQL recently became available as one of the managed database offerings provided by Amazon RDS alongside MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server. If you haven't tried it already, RDS provides a great platform for those getting started with PostgreSQL. Here's what you need to know.

Voting is now open in the 2014 Database Trends and Applications Readers' Choice Awards. It's time to cast your vote for Best Database Overall. There are 40 nominees in this category - ranging from newcomers to seasoned veterans, open source to proprietary, relational to NoSQL, on premise to cloud.

Cloud database technology may be ready for the enterprise, but enterprises are not quite ready for cloud databases. Even leading cloud database proponents agree that cloud databases are a relatively new—and untested phenomenon.

Calypso Technology, Inc., an integrated capital markets platform provider, announced that Calypso version 14 has achieved Oracle Exadata Optimized status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). According to Tej Sidhu, senior vice president for Engineering and CTO at Calypso Technology, in simulations of data-intensive straight through-processing tasks, Calypso achieved performance gains of up to 500% using Exadata hardware.

Kelly Stirman, director of product marketing at MongoDB, emphasized simplicity, reliability, and security in a recent conversation about the new capabilities of MongoDB 2.6. "Don't let the 2.6 fool you. It is absolutely the biggest release we have ever done."

Teradata has introduced the Teradata Database 15 with a new software product called Teradata QueryGrid that provides virtual compute capability within and beyond the Teradata Unified Data Architecture. The company also announced Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6750 platform with new capabilities to support customers' most demanding real-time workloads.

HDInsight is a 100% Apache Hadoop service, currently at v2.2, available through Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud offerings. HDInsight makes all of the standard features you'd expect from a Hadoop implementation available in a simple, scalable, and fairly cheap cloud environment.

Driving a wide range of applications, from operational applications such as fraud detection to strategic analysis such as customer segmentation, advanced analytics goes deeper than traditional business intelligence activities into the "why" of the situation, and delivers likely outcomes.

Using the Oracle Database 12c Multitenant features sets up the 12c environment in a way that provides some additional flexibility and supports a move to a pluggable databases setting. If database instances are created as CDB with a single PDB, and the requirement comes to consolidate several of these instances together, the move to a Multitenant environment is a whole lot easier.

Ntirety, a provider of remote DBA, data consulting, and DBA on-demand services for Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL, has been acquired by HOSTING. With the acquisition, said Ntirety founder Michael Corey, the Dedham-based company becomes a division of HOSTING, with Corey as president of the division.

The theme for COLLABORATE 14-IOUG Forum is "Become Your Office Superhero," because, while you may look like a mild mannered technical resource in meetings or at your desk, you fight a daily battle to protect your organization's data, improve performance and generate new business opportunities. COLLABORATE is your chance to recharge your superpowers and to take on new skills.

SAP has officially announced Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 16, a major release of the company's RDBMS, as well as Replication Server, 15.7 SP200 which includes synchronous replication for HA/DR for SAP Business Suite on ASE. It has been 9 years since Sybase (acquired by SAP in 2010) announced ASE 15 in August 2005. With the new release, said Dan Lahl, SAP VP, Database & Technology Marketing, SAP is providing "the right system of record that is going to be able to handle the new world of transaction processing."

Attunity Replicate, a data replication and loading solution, has introduced new support for MySQL as a source and target as well as for multiple non-relational sources including Enscribe, RMS, IMS, and VSAM.

A new Development Milestone Release for MySQL 5.7, as well as other MySQL product releases and early access features, has been announced by Oracle. With MySQL 5.7.4 DMR, the open source database is twice as fast as the previous version.

Be sure to nominate your favorite vendors' products now. The nominating process for the Database Trends and Applications' Readers' Choice Awards is well underway, and will conclude on Friday, March 28, 2014.

Alyssa Johnson, who became president of the OAUG in January, recently spoke with DBTA about the challenges and choices facing OAUG members. A major topic of discussion for Oracle users at the upcoming COLLABORATE 14 conference will be how and when to migrate to E-Business Suite 12, says Johnson. Covering a range of business areas, including CRM, financial management, supply chain management, EBS is a backbone suite of ERP applications on which many companies rely to run their businesses. End of support is looming for 11i, Johnson says, and it's time to decide on 12.1.3 or 12.2 and start planning that upgrade now.

You have until April 11 to take advantage of special pricing for DBTA's Data Summit, which will take place at the New York Hilton Midtown, from May 12 to May 14. Providing an intensive 2-day immersion into critical technologies for becoming a data-driven enterprise, IT practitioners and business stakeholders alike will benefit from Data Summit.

Today, businesses are ending up with more and more critical dependency on their data infrastructure. If underlying database systems are not available, manufacturing floors cannot operate, stock exchanges cannot trade, retail stores cannot sell, banks cannot serve customers, mobile phone users cannot place calls, stadiums cannot host sports games, gyms cannot verify their subscribers' identity. Here is a look at some of the trends and how they are going to impact data management professionals.

Finding high quality education and training remains a key challenge for SAP users, according to Mike Harrold, executive director for the Independent SAP Technical Users Group (ISUG-TECH). With the 2014 ISUG-TECH conference fast-approaching (April 14-17), Harrold talked about SAP's planned launch of ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise) 16 at the conference and the best ways for SAP users to get the product information they need.

Newton, Mass.-based ScaleBase has announced the 3.0 version of its Distributed Database Platform. ScaleBase also introduced a beta program for a new product called Analysis Genie that helps companies determine the best way to scale out a database from a single MySQL instance to a distributed cluster by analyzing their schema and queries.

Oracle announced that fiscal 2014 Q3 total revenues were up 4% to $9.3 billion. In constant currency, Oracle's Cloud Software subscriptions revenues grew 25% and its Engineered Systems revenue grew more than 30% in the quarter, said Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz in a statement released by the company.